Luminary: The Setup

As it's women's month, me and a group of other wonderful developers were tasked with building something for women and for the open source community and we decided on Luminary

What's Luminary ?

Or rather, what will Luminary be? — since the project is still evolving.
Luminary will be an open-sourced, community-driven directory and news platform that spotlights impactful women who are driving change across different fields. The goal is to create a space where stories, achievements, and contributions of women can be documented, shared, and discovered by others.

The Setup

This week our primary focus was laying the foundation of the project. My specific responsibilities involved maintaining the repository, setting up the open-source structure, and contributing to the landing page.

During this phase we:

• Outlined the core requirements for the Luminary project
• Set clear goals and responsibilities for the core members of the team
• Established a design system in collaboration with the design team and their requirements
• Built out the landing page, including a section highlighting all project contributors
• Chose the initial tech stack for development

For the frontend, we decided to start with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with plans to migrate to React as the project scales.
For the backend, we chose Node.js with Express to power the API and application logic.

This approach allows us to move quickly in the early stages while still leaving room for the project to grow into a more structured architecture later on.

Contributors

Some other really great people worked on this too:

• Isaac Shosanya ( Lead Maintainer ): I was tasked with the open source repository setup; including reviewing pull requests and documenting a standard every contributor will follow for the project, I also contributed to building out a section on the landing page.
• Ramnan Ramyil ( Project Lead )
• Awoyemi Abiola ( Project Lead )
• Daniel Chisom ( Engineering Lead )
• Micheal Omonedo ( Design Lead )
• Ui/Ux Designer ( Ariyo Taiwo )

Lessons Learned

As the lead maintainer, one of the biggest lessons I learned was how important clear standards and structured workflows are in open-source collaboration. When contributors come from different backgrounds and experience levels, having well-defined contribution guidelines, coding standards, and a clear chain of command makes the entire development process much smoother.

Establishing these structures early helps contributors understand how to contribute, where decisions are made, and what expectations exist within the project. It also makes reviewing pull requests, resolving issues, and coordinating contributions far more efficient.

This experience pushed me to dive deeper into how successful open-source projects are organized and maintained—from documentation and repository structure to contributor management and review processes. Seeing how these systems enable collaboration at scale has been both fascinating and inspiring.

Overall, working on Luminary has been a really eye-opening experience, and contributing to an open-source initiative like this is something I would gladly be a part of again in the future.